In a new memoir, Fanny Singer reflects on
a childhood at Chez Panisse.
From the Hearth
When Fanny Singer was a baby, her mother, the culinary
demigod Alice Waters, would take her to Waters’s famed
Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, swaddle her in fresh dish towels,
and place her in an extra-large salad bowl while she worked. Singer
attributes her lifelong love of greens to these “early kitchen cribs.”
“It was definitely an unconventional upbringing,” concedes the 36-year-
old by phone from San Francisco. Singer’s memoir, Always Home:
A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories (Knopf), out this month, is a tender
portrait of the woman better known to the world as the mother of
the farm-to-table movement.
The book is organized into chapters mostly named after seemingly
simple dishes, such as “Chicken Stock” or “Potpie” (transformed,
of course, under Waters’s precise care, into something transcendent),
and punctuated by recipes. “The recipes were almost imperative,”
explains Singer. “I knew the audience that is interested in this book is
also one that cooks avidly and cares about food.” Those recipes and
Singer’s attendant recollections range from the precious—wine tastings
at age eight with her vintner father, Stephen Singer; candied violets to
VLIFE
rim the edge of a lemon-curd cake—to the
amusing: a “Fire Alarm Chicken” that
requires an oven cranked up to 500°F and
once resulted in the New Haven fire
department knocking down Singer’s college
dorm–room door.
If the book is partly a manual for eating
and living well, it is also a chronicle of an
exceptional culinary upbringing. Singer describes knowing the best
alcoves for hide-and-seek in the legendary restaurant, gathering
around the pizza oven as a preteen, and beginning to work at Chez
Panisse by cleaning vats of salted anchovies. One of her first
words was lobster, and young Fanny preferred to fast for 24 hours
rather than submit to a Big Mac during a flight delay. Singer’s
school lunchbox was a carry on–size cooler equipped with silverware,
a nosegay from Waters’s garden, a Tetris-like array of containers
securing the separate ingredients for a salad, plus homemade garlic
bread and a seasonal fruit macédoine.
In the morning before school, Singer was
sometimes served “a perfectly soft-boiled blue
Araucana egg with a marigold-hued liquid
center into which I would delight in plunging
buttered-toast ‘soldiers,’ ” or a hearth-cooked egg
by way of an iron-forged egg spoon. A version of
that spoon is now sold through Singer’s design
brand Permanent Collection, which she runs with
her business partner, Mariah Nielson. But despite
Permanent Collection responsibilities and writing
deadlines (Singer has a Ph.D. in art history and
writes criticism for publications like The Wall Street
Journal and Artforum), she makes time to cook most
days. And while she lives in a subdivided Victorian
in the Mission District with her advertising-creative boyfriend, Andrew,
she still spends one night a week at her mother’s house in Berkeley.
“When I go home, it feels like my mom’s house is the eternal home,” she
says. “Even though I have an apartment that contains my belongings,
there’s that feeling of homecoming every time there.”
Though Singer was approached in her late teens to write a book about
her childhood chez Waters, she’s content to have waited. “It took quite
a bit of distance and figuring out an identity that was independent of my
relationship to my mother.” This includes, and perhaps hinges on, the
acceptance of having a famous parent. “I will be Alice Waters’s daughter
no matter what I do. I’ve come to accept, in my 30s especially, that
there’s no way of getting out from underneath that,” Singer explains with
serene frankness. “Of course, I don’t want to divide myself entirely
from her, because that relationship is part of my identity and it’s also
something that gives me great joy.”—chloe malle
BOOKS
BOUNTY HUNTER
LEFT: SINGER
IN HER MOTHER’S
GARDEN. ABOVE: A
“DECONSTRUCTED”
NIÇOISE SALAD.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
BRIGITTE LACOMBE
FOR ALWAYS HOME.
228 MARCH 2020 VOGUE.COM
BOOK: ©
2020 PENGUIN RANDOM
HOUSE
